Anne Snabes – The Cornell Daily Sunhttp://cornellsun.com
Independent Since 1880Tue, 26 Sep 2017 19:51:26 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.4http://i2.wp.com/cornellsun.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/cropped-red-on-white-website-icon-2.png?fit=32%2C32Anne Snabes – The Cornell Daily Sunhttp://cornellsun.com
3232C.U. Downtown Prepares for Second Year of Festivitieshttp://cornellsun.com/2017/08/29/c-u-downtown-prepares-for-second-year-of-festivities/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/08/29/c-u-downtown-prepares-for-second-year-of-festivities/#respondTue, 29 Aug 2017 04:54:17 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1997002Downtown Ithaca will be abuzz with Cornell students listening to performers and exploring stores this Saturday at the second annual C.U. Downtown.

Seventeen different Cornell groups will perform at C.U. Downtown including Yamatai, Cornell Big Red Marching Band and Cornell Bhangra, according to the event’s Facebook page. Students will also be able to get coupons for Ithaca stores and compete in a Game of Thrones scavenger hunt, according to Allison Graffin, Downtown Ithaca Alliance Marketing Director.

The Tatkon Center and DIA are among the sponsors of the event that drew an estimated 2,000 people last year, according to Margherita Fabrizio, The Jack and Rilla Neafsey Director of The Carol Tatkon Center.

Fabrizio described the event as a “back to school celebration,” and emphasized that it is for new students, returning students and Ithaca community members.

“It’s really an opportunity for first-year students to learn about what’s downtown, and to begin to see how close-by it is and that it provides a really good respite for them,” she said.

“There were many people last year who were performers who were upper-level students who weren’t that familiar with it either,” she added. “I’ve heard a lot of students say as they’re seniors, ‘Oh I wish I had discovered Ithaca earlier.’”

Stores in downtown Ithaca will also have unique demonstrations on Saturday.

“Most of the stores downtown are doing activities inside the shops to show the students a little bit about who we are and what’s downtown,” Graffin said.

Students will be able to “mix their own scent” at Linsey Layne and observe a laser cutter and 3D printer at work in Ithaca Generator, according to Graffin. Multiple establishments will even serve free ice cream.

The DIA created a map for the event that includes around 50 coupons, according to Graffin. These will be for shops such as The Cornell Store and Yoga Path. Graffin also added that the DIA’s scavenger hunt involves students searching for Game of Thrones references — of which there are 30 — in stores downtown.

“The students can go in, find the reference, collect the sticker on the map, and then the more places you visit, the more qualifying points you can earn for some really cool prizes,” she said.

Some of the prizes relate to Game of Thrones, while others are gift certificates or other items from Ithaca shops.

Graffin also added the TCAT bus system will adjust its schedule to stop more often than usual on Cornell’s campus this Saturday.

“These routes normally have a bus on the route every 30 minutes, and so they’re adding additional buses to the different routes, so that it’s a more frequent shuttle, so that more students can get on the bus and ride it down the hill,” she said.

Fabrizio said the event will allow Ithaca residents to see how Cornell students fit into the Ithaca community.

“It’s a great way for Ithacans to see Cornell students in a very different way and to really appreciate what they contribute to the fabric to the community, because this really shows they bring so much of their own culture to these shows,” she said. “It’s just this really great celebration of the diversity of the community that we have here.”

The event will also introduce students to service opportunities in Ithaca. Fabrizio said there will be a tent at C.U. Downtown representing Cornell Public Service Center and Engaged Cornell, while another tent will represent two organizations called Home Plate — which allows Cornell students to eat dinner with an Ithaca family — and International Friendship Program.

“[C.U. Downtown] should also be a way to think about the community that you’re part of and that you’re going to be part of for four years or more and what your role could be in it,” Fabrizio said.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/08/29/c-u-downtown-prepares-for-second-year-of-festivities/feed/0Understaffed and Underfunded: Identity-Based Programs Struggle to Keep Uphttp://cornellsun.com/2017/08/23/understaffed-and-underfunded-identity-based-programs-struggle-to-keep-up/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/08/23/understaffed-and-underfunded-identity-based-programs-struggle-to-keep-up/#commentsWed, 23 Aug 2017 05:04:03 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1972314“It challenged a lot of the assumptions that I had of the way that gender operates, the way that sexuality operates,” said Hadiyah Chowdhury ’18.

Chowdhury was an undeclared sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences when she decided to enroll in a Feminine, Gender & Sexuality Studies course.

“It was just a totally different way of thinking about gender, thinking about race, honestly,” she said. “We talked a lot about race in that class, because it was about sex and sexuality in a cross-cultural context.”

Following this course, Chowdhury pursued other courses in the discipline and declared a FGSS major, along with anthropology.

Identity studies programs like FGSS and ethnic studies programs like Asian-American Studies have battled numerous problems in recent years, leaving them struggling to match the demand of growing enrollments.

This past spring, students demanded resolutions to these concerns from members of the administration, including Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Gretchen Ritter ’83 and Dean of Students Vijay Pendakur.

In May, more students organized at a meeting with Ritter and Pendakur to address the state of ethnic and identity based programs. Dissatisfied with the meeting, more than half the attendees walked out of the meeting early.

With low numbers of faculty in these programs and one program — LGBT studies — having no appointed faculty, the inevitable result is some students are left unable to pursue classes in identity-related programs and the programs themselves cannot expand.

Shortage of Faculty

Despite what Prof. Durba Ghosh, director of FGSS, refers to as a “high demand” for classes within FGSS, the program is understaffed.

“Our courses fill up very quickly, which is really great,” Ghosh said. “We’ve increased the capacity, so the courses are bigger than they used to be. The challenges that we have are staffing those courses.

FGSS enrollments have almost doubled in the last three years — from around 700 in 2014 to around 1,200 in 2017, according to Samara Selden, FGSS program assistant. Ghosh said juniors and seniors fill up the introductory FGSS courses, preventing underclassman from taking them.

“Now we’re reserving 10 spots in the intro FGSS courses for the first-year students, but that’s still not enough,” she said. “What we’re getting are juniors and seniors who take the intro courses, but they’re not here long enough to take the more advanced courses or take on majors or minors.”

Five faculty members are jointly appointed in FGSS and other departments, according to Ghosh. So far, the program has been able to hire three tenure-track faculty members since 2010.

“While the faculty in the program feel stretched in our ability to staff all the courses we would like to offer, we have not been restricted as much as other departments and programs,” she said.

Ghosh said the college has “done very little hiring” in recent years. She did note that this is soon to change.

“I learned on Friday that the Arts college has increased the number of positions it will fill in 2017- 2018, due, in part, to some new hiring initiatives,” Ghosh wrote in an email in late July.

The College of Arts and Sciences is planning to hire a new faculty member in FGSS and Africana Studies, according to Ghosh.

However, Chowdhury believes there is more work to be done.

“My number one thing would be to hire more people,” she said. “But if they’re doing that, I’m happy to hear that. My only concern is that the administration would hire someone and then be like, ‘we’ve done our job, that’s enough.’”

Another such program, Asian American Studies, has also faced a shortage of faculty, according to Prof. Derek Chang, former director of Asian American Studies. ­

Despite significant student demand — 101 students enrolled in courses cross-listed with AAS last fall semester, and 198 students enrolled last spring semester, according to Chang — the program has a total of 3 professors.

Chang said three professors are appointed to the program and an additional professor offers courses in the College of Human Ecology that are cross-listed with Asian American studies.

He said additional faculty members would allow the program to “teach classes more regularly,” allowing for student demand to become “fairly steady” rather than “fluctuating widely.” In doing so Chang said that Cornell “might be able to grow the program.”

Cornell’s AAS program has kept the same number of faculty, while other universities’ programs have grown, according to Chang. This lack of growth has left Cornell trailing behind.

“I could come up with arguments for having faculty of seven,” Chang said. “There was a time when Cornell was the most important, and in some ways, the most vibrant Asian American studies program outside of the West Coast. Right now, it’s the University of Illinois.”

Latino/a Studies is also in need of more faculty, but in a particular discipline: the social sciences.

Prof. Debra Castillo, director of Latino/a Studies, said the Latino/a studies classes with the largest enrollment numbers are social science courses, in fields like sociology and health. However, a majority of LSP professors are in the humanities.

“We are very aware … that there’s a lot of interest on the part of our students in some of the social studies areas where we don’t have enough faculty,” Castillo said. “We are actively engaged in conversations about new faculty hires particularly in the social science areas.”

“With the student interest moving increasingly towards social sciences, we are planning ahead for a good balance between student needs and faculty expertise,” she continued.

LGBT Studies confronts its unique problem: there are no faculty members appointed to the program.

Instead, the program relies on faculty in other departments volunteering to make their course be a LGBT Studies course.

In fact, the LGBT Studies program was created because of faculty demands in the 1990s, according to Prof. Judith Peraino, director of LGBT Studies.

“LGBT Studies exists because of a negotiation that occurred to retain a faculty member,” Peraino said.

The negotiating faculty member was Prof. Biddy Martin, now president of Amherst College. As a result, the administration started to provide funds for a LGBT lecture series and agreed to hire an English professor who specializes in queer theory, according to Peraino and Prof. Ellis Hanson, English, who was the hired faculty member.

Peraino said that in 1996, faculty created the LGBT Studies program to differentiate it from Women’s Studies. However, little has changed since then.

“No further commitments or funding to the LGBT Studies program has been made by the administration since the 1990s,” she added.

In such situations, Peraino said searching for faculty to teach courses depends on her “work[ing] with the good graces of other departments.”

“When I am trying to staff the Introduction to LGBT Studies, which is a healthy course, I can’t always find someone to staff it because I have to try to work with the good graces of other departments and ask if they will allow their faculty member to get a course release in order to teach the intro course,” she said.

Lack of Administrative Support

In addition to difficulties with student to faculty ratios, many identity-based programs and departments have struggled to serve their students due to minimal administrative assistance.

Without sufficient administrative support, student enrollment, program planning and keeping track of the majors and minors with the programs become greater challenges.

Fiscal cuts in 2010 caused FGSS to reduce its administrative assistant’s position from three-quarter-time to half-time.

“That’s a kind of substantial cut, especially at a time when our enrollments are going up, so we’re dealing with more students,” Ghosh said.

The LGBT Studies program only has one part-time administrative assistant, which it shares with FGSS.

“We’re grossly understaffed in terms of office staff,” Peraino said. “It’s not easy to grow a program when you only have a part-time program manager and only volunteer faculty.”

Program directors may also personally feel the effect of low funding. Peraino’s position itself is minimally compensated.

“The position that I’m in is hardly compensated, so it’s almost completely volunteer,” she said. “A little bit of money. And it goes into my research account.”

Peraino said that directors of departments are exempt from teaching the full course load, as they have administrative work to carry out. But program directors like Peraino still have to teach two courses during the semester.

“If something called the ‘Director of LGBT Studies’ doesn’t get a course release, that severely limits the time that they can put into growing that program,” she said.

Budget Cuts

According to the administration, these problems plaguing ethnic studies and identity programs are partially a result of the University’s fiscal landscape over the past decade.

Ritter told The Sun that Cornell had “significant budget shortfalls” both in 2008 to 2010 and in 2014 to 2015, leading to budget cuts in identity based programs.

“In each case, when the university allocated a reduced budget to the College of Arts and Sciences, we distributed these cuts across the college evenly (with only a few exceptions),” Ritter said in a statement to The Sun.

In 2016, all departments and programs in the College of Arts and Sciences — including ethnic studies programs — received a 0.5 percent cut. Ritter said the college made “additional cuts or pull backs” on departments or programs that could afford them. The chemistry department for example lost $490,000 in 2016, the history department $140,000 and the physics department $25,000.

Ghosh said the budget for FGSS has increased since 2008, partly because the program has hired three faculty members since then. To be able to afford these new faculty members, other parts of the FGSS budget have been stretched. The programming budget for FGSS, for example, is 30 percent less than what it was in 2010, according to Ghosh.

“We’d like to be able to have a really robust group of speakers and high profile people come to visit, particularly because our classes are so popular,” she said.

Other departments and programs were affected by the 2008 fiscal crisis, but their endowments offered them more security.

Prof. Kurt Jordan, director of the Cornell Institute of Archaeology and Material Studies, said the College of Arts and Sciences reduced the archaeology program’s operating budget by 50 percent, from $1000 to $500, after the fiscal crisis of 2008. The budget has not changed since then.

However, much of CIAMS’ funding comes from endowments. These endowments pay for archaeology’s programming and for their postdoc.

“The endowments are good for a program because the program decides how they’re going to be spent,” Jordan said. “The more endowments you have, the less you’re reliant on the college. So that the college stuff can go up and down quite a bit, as the 2008 financial crisis showed, but if you have your own endowment, it’s a lot more stable.”

The English department also has endowed funds that go towards lectures and reading series, according to Prof. Roger Gilbert, chair of English.

However, not all programs can compensate for budget cuts with endowment funding.

As a relatively new program, FGSS does not receive as much alumni-fundings.

“English is different and history is different because they are departments,” Ghosh said. “They are departments that have a pretty big alumni base, that have some independent funding of their own. Programs like FGSS, LGBT, programs like Latino studies or Asian American studies have some of the same issues. These aren’t very old programs. They’re not super well established, so we’re dependent in terms of our funding on the college.”

Students Left as “Quasi-Administrators”

Students of ethnic studies have experienced the effects of low funding firsthand. Rebecca Lee ’18, an Asian American Studies minor, noted that there is there is a “limited” amount of AAS faculty.

“Right now the teaching capacity of the staff is limited because there just isn’t enough,” Lee said. “The limited number just means that there are limited classes available.”

Luckily for Lee and other AAS students, the program submitted a hiring proposal to the dean of Arts & Sciences which was approved this summer, according to Chang.

FGSS is also lacking in certain opportunities. Chowdhury stressed the importance of programming, of which FGSS has little.

“I remember one time actually FGSS brought two spoken word poets to Biotech for an evening of spoken word poetry, and it was incredible,” she said. “It was so good. I would love to see that kind of stuff happening more.”

Students are the ones who ensure that these ethnic studies programs survive, according to Mayra Valadez ’18, a Latino/a studies minor.

“Obviously, the reason why these programs were created oftentimes [was] because the students demanded that they be created,” Valadez said. “So the sustainability of these programs rests on the students themselves, while students should be at Cornell as students and not as quasi-administrators.”

In fact, the onus fell on students this past spring, as they helped the Latino Studies program raise $20,000 to support the program, according to Valadez. Members of the Student Assembly have even proposed that the S.A. give its surplus to ethnic studies programs.

“[It] shouldn’t be an expectation of the students to keep reminding the administrators that they have this commitment to make sure that students of color, who have been continually disenfranchised, can learn from professors who look like them, about their own culture, in what courses they are able to take, in the Ivory Tower,” Valadez said.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/08/23/understaffed-and-underfunded-identity-based-programs-struggle-to-keep-up/feed/6Cornell Postdoc Found Dead in Adirondack Mountain Riverhttp://cornellsun.com/2017/07/07/cornell-postdoc-found-dead-in-adirondack-mountain-river/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/07/07/cornell-postdoc-found-dead-in-adirondack-mountain-river/#respondFri, 07 Jul 2017 22:54:11 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1776809Matthew Miller, a postdoc in the Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, died Monday in the Ausable river in the Adirondack Mountains.

Police are looking into the death as a drowning. The river had been experiencing tall water levels, according to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise.

Miller earned his Ph.D. from SUNY Upstate Medical University. Miller then worked in the lab of Prof. Anthony Bretscher, molecular biology and genetics, for the past two years where “he was doing a cell biology project, trying to understand how cells are polarized,” Bretscher said.

“He just actually last week made a big breakthrough, which he told us about at group meeting, which we had last Wednesday,” Bretscher said. “He knocked out two genes out of cultured cells and saw a strong phenotype, which will tell us what those genes do.”

Outside the lab, Miller was someone who “lived life to the full[est],” Bretscher said, known for his passion for hiking.

“You never saw him in a sad mood,” he said. “He was always happy, and he spread happiness to everybody he met.”

Miller was also a 46er, meaning that he climbed all 46 peaks in the Adirondacks that are taller than 4,000 feet, Bretscher said.

“He had climbed most of them for a second time with his fiancé for her to also become a 46er,” he added.

Photo Courtesy of Anthony Bretscher

Photo Courtesy of Anthony Bretscher

“He had lots of plants at home, he had pets at home,” Bretscher said. “He chose to live in a rural area as he loved nature and the outdoors.”

Rob Gingras, a graduate student in the Bretscher lab and friend of Miller, echoed Bretscher’s sentiments, characterizing Miller as a “fun guy.”

“Matt was an avid concert-goer, a professional fun-haver and an absolute destroyer of silence,” Gingras said. “He was great at the work he did, but more importantly he was a great friend to me and all who knew him.”

Cécile Sauvanet, a postdoc in the Bretscher lab, also spoke to Miller’s presence both in and out of the lab, describing that he “was talkative, joyful and always joking around.”

“He was someone who was filling the lab and the space, the whole floor, even the whole institute,” Sauvanet said.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/07/07/cornell-postdoc-found-dead-in-adirondack-mountain-river/feed/0Summer Workshop Pushes Minority Students to Pursue Computer Science Degreeshttp://cornellsun.com/2017/06/16/summer-workshop-pushes-minority-students-to-pursue-computer-science-degrees/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/06/16/summer-workshop-pushes-minority-students-to-pursue-computer-science-degrees/#commentsSat, 17 Jun 2017 03:27:09 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1682432Undergraduate tech students from universities around the country convened at Cornell this past week for a week-long computer science workshop, encouraging students to consider graduate degrees in the field.

The workshop, Software Defined Network Interface, aims to increase the number of underrepresented minority Ph.D. students in computer science. The participants come from various universities including North Carolina State University and the University of Puerto Rico.

Prof. Hakim Weatherspoon, computer science, created the workshop because he said the percentage of underrepresented minorities in computer science was “very low.”

In fact, while between 1,500 and 1,600 students earn a Ph.D. in computer science each year, fewer than 3 percent of those students are underrepresented minorities, according to Weatherspoon.

“Each year there’s about 20, 25 that are African-American,” he said. “Around 20, 25 that are Hispanic, and 2 to 5 that are Native American. So about 50 total, which is less than 3 percent.”

“If we have 25 here,” Weatherspoon added about the program, “and then they all went on and pursued a Ph.D. and obtained one, we would have double the number of Ph.D.s that are from underrepresented minorities.”

The program — funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation and Google — was free for participating students.

In the mornings, the students attended lectures from Cornell professors and deans from departments including computer science and engineering. After the morning lecture, students ventured around campus, visiting the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source and attending a campus tour. In the afternoon, students worked coding their research project.

“The focus of this workshop, research-wise, is computer networks,” Weatherspoon said. “They actually do a project related to computer networks.”

Weatherspoon described how there is a “pipeline” responsible for the low numbers of Ph.D. candidates from underrepresented minorities.

“If you go backwards from top down, one reason is there’s very few underrepresented minority faculty in computer science,” he said. “I’m the only one here at Cornell and across the nation, there’s very, very few. A lot of schools have zero, and some have one, and very few have two.”

In addition to “very few” minority students in Ph.D. programs, some of these Ph.D. graduates choose to enter the computer science industry instead of becoming faculty.

Weatherspoon explained that even before college, there are “not as many” underrepresented minority students choosing to enter STEM.

“What we see is a high interest in computer science, but then to get into a computer science program, especially at a top university, and make it all the way through, and then go onto a Ph.D., you’re just losing people the entire way,” Weatherspoon said.

Ato Watson, a junior at Florida Memorial University, participated in the workshop, describing the experience as an “eye-opener.”

“The workshop has been an eye-opener, being a student from an underrepresented minority institution, coming here, an Ivy League institution, where research is being done at an extensive scale,” Watson said.

“I’m one of those students where opportunities like this doesn’t present themsel[ves],” he added. “I’m an international student from Jamaica. This experience is new for me, so I’m trying my very best to learn as much as possible.”

Jaelin Jordan, a junior at Hampton University, also participated in the program. He described how the participants in the program brought varying skills and backgrounds to the group.

From these different skillsets, Jordan emphasized the value of collaboration in the computer science field because “the key to computer science,” he said, “is that there is never one solution; there’s multiple ways to solve a problem.”

Like Jordan, Maya Mundell ’14, a member of the workshop, praised collaboration among students, particularly in that the workshop’s participants came from around the world, including Egypt, Ethiopia and India.

“We all really enjoyed each other’s company and we all learned a lot from one another,” Mundell said. “I think that type of experience is extremely invaluable because now we all have friends that span the world pretty much. And we all came together with the common interest of tech education and tech career opportunities.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/06/16/summer-workshop-pushes-minority-students-to-pursue-computer-science-degrees/feed/5CORNELL CLOSE-UPS | Prof. David Gries Shares Cornell History of Programming, Reacts to Facebook Memeshttp://cornellsun.com/2017/05/03/prof-david-gries-shares-cornell-history-of-programming-reacts-to-facebook-memes/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/05/03/prof-david-gries-shares-cornell-history-of-programming-reacts-to-facebook-memes/#commentsThu, 04 May 2017 03:42:10 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1463437Prof. David Gries, computer science, programmed for the first time in 1959 on a “fake computer.” The machine used a “fake language,” Gries said, as computer languages like Java had not been invented yet.

Pointing to his Mac Desktop computer, Gries emphasized that when he had his first job out of college “all we had was a terminal keyboard, and we punched our programs on cards, on punch cards.”

When Gries started teaching at Cornell in 1969, the University’s computer was located near the airport. Students “[punched] their cards” in the basement of a building on campus, and then the cards were shipped to the airport.

“[Students] were much more careful than they are today, because let’s suppose you left out a comma on a line in a program, a little syntax error, like missing a period at the end of a sentence,” he said. “Well, these cards would be trucked out to the computer, would be loaded in and run, and five hours later, you would get the output back. If you left out a semicolon or a period, that was it. You wasted five hours.”

Since the 1970s, teaching in the computer science department has changed significantly.

“It used to be so much easier teaching,” he said. “I taught this course in 1973. How did I do it? Five minutes before the lecture, I would look at my notes, grab my piece of chalk, and head for the board. That was it.”

“I didn’t have to answer email questions, I didn’t have to look at Piazza, because there wasn’t any,” he continued. “Now we have to have a website that has all of the PowerPoint slides on it, we got to set up this Piazza thing. It’s just a lot more work, but it’s better.”

As a senior at Queens College, Gries used “machine language” to program. Gries and his classmates were not even able to check the programs that they wrote, because compilers were not around yet.

A few years after joining the Cornell faculty, in 1973, Gries began teaching an introductory programming course. He said that his first research focused on “compiler writing,” which is creating a program that “translates high level language into machine language.”

He wrote the first book on this topic in 1971. He then developed an interest in programming methodology.

“How do I write programs, so that they’re correct, and how can we prove them correct?” he said. “[Programming methodology] was a big focus, starting in 1968, ’69, ’70. And we didn’t really know how to do it at that time.”

Gries’ research in programming methodology involves making computer science more accessible to beginners.

“A lot of my research in that area has been to take those ideas down into the undergrad courses, because you don’t just want to teach professional programmers,” he explained. “Everybody should learn how to program right, right from the beginning.”

Gries has worked with Prof. Tony Hoare, University of Oxford, computer science, and Prof. Edsgar W. Dijkstra, University of Texas, Austin, computer science, on this research.

“These guys did a lot of groundbreaking work in this stuff, and I just followed along,” Gries said. “I became good friends with both of them.”

He said that Dijkstra wrote a book on “how to develop programs formally.”

“It was a difficult book to read — it was a research monograph,” he described. “I just turned things around a bit and put it in a different style and made a textbook that undergraduates could read. This was 1981. And I called it ‘Dijkstra for the masses.’”

After college, Gries originally decided he wanted to be a mathematician, but he said he “had to figure out what mathematicians did first.” So he started working as a mathematician-programmer at U.S. Naval Weapons Laboratory in Dahlgren, Virginia.

“There they taught us the new programming language Fortran in a week, and then we were professional programmers,” he said.

Since then, Gries has been a dedicated member of the Cornell faculty. Gries enjoys teaching for numerous reasons, one of which is the long summer break. Gries said he was associate dean for eight years, and, in that position, he was the speaker for the teaching award ceremony.

“I would ask everybody, ‘What’s the three most important reasons for teaching?’” he said. “They wouldn’t know, expecting me to have a serious answer. I would then tell them, ‘June, July, and August.’ One nice thing about teaching, not about the teaching itself, is how we get breaks, and how we renew ourselves.”

He also likes the academic freedom that comes with being a professor.

“We have a lot more flexibility in what we do compared to most people,” Gries said. “We can do what we want. We have to go out and get research funds for it, of course, but it’s our choice what we work on.”

Of course, he likes to teach too.

“The teaching has been satisfying as well,” he said. “It’s nice to see students succeed.”

Recently, Gries has attracted much attention on the Internet because of his comments on Piazza. He is the subject of many memes on the Make Cornell Meme Again Facebook page.

“I probably said something at one point that caught their interest,” he said. “Some of my answers on the Piazza to questions may be a little bit short. I’m just trying to answer the question. It’s not conversational enough.”

“I’m happy with [the attention],” he continued. “I have nothing against that. There’s also a t-shirt now on the Slope Day.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/05/03/prof-david-gries-shares-cornell-history-of-programming-reacts-to-facebook-memes/feed/1Cornell Alumnae Named “Women Worth Watching in STEM”http://cornellsun.com/2017/04/13/cornell-alumnae-named-women-worth-watching-in-stem/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/04/13/cornell-alumnae-named-women-worth-watching-in-stem/#commentsThu, 13 Apr 2017 04:58:28 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1363704With STEM advancements popping up all over campus and even in New York City, Cornell alumnae are adding laurels to the University’s reputation for excellence in the field. The Profiles in Diversity Journal has recently named two Cornell alumnae as “Women Worth Watching in STEM.”

The two women – Anita Meiklejohn ’81 and Lauren Degnan ’92 — work as attorneys for Fish and Richardson, a globally recognized patent and intellectual property law firm.

Meiklejohn majored in chemistry at Cornell and Degnan majored in mechanical engineering; both use their STEM backgrounds in their current work.

Meiklejohn and Degnan were among the 45 women who received the award in February, according to press release made by PDJ.

“Collectively, these leaders are breaking barriers for women in STEM careers and we are honored to recognize them as well as the companies supporting them,” said James Rector, PDJ publisher, in the press release. “Supporting women in STEM is an essential part of a worldwide strategy to innovate, educate and build a more connected world.”

Degnan has noticed the gender gap in STEM since her undergraduate education. When Degnan attended an orientation event for Cornell, she learned that her engineering class was 25 percent women.

She admitted that while thispercentage was “a remarkably high number back then,” engineering “historically has been more of a male-dominated field,” something she sees still today in her work.

“[In] the world of patent law and patent litigation … there’s a huge benefit of having a technical background, like I have,” she said. “We find in patent-law and patent litigation is also rather male-dominated. The editors [of PDJ] saw some value in seeing a woman of my background in patent litigation.”

Degnan added that recently when she worked on a case with a U.K. start-up company, she was able to able to collaborate and connect with another woman in a male-dominated environment.

“The genius behind the technology of this startup company was a women, a physicist,” she said. “She had come up with this truly pioneering invention and had tried to commercialize it. Meanwhile lots of people were likely using her pioneering invention.”

“She said that she knows that in her line of business, women have to be much better than the men to be treated equal,” Degnan continued. “It was like we had a bonding moment that we both had come up in tech fields that were male-dominated.”

Meiklejohn said that her work involves talking with clients who have developed new inventions. The work additionally includes a lot of writing, and Meiklejohn helps more junior lawyers write patent applications for clients.

Meiklejohn said there is a “preponderance of one gender” in patent law. One element that allowed her to advance in her field was that she started working at her firm at the same time as another woman.

“The men at my firm are great, I never felt like I wasn’t being taken seriously, but still it was largely men I was surrounded by,” she said. “It was great to have a woman who started the same day I did in my exact same practice area.”

Her husband also contributed to her career advancement by working part-time, which allowed Meiklejohn more time to devote to advancing in the firm.

“When we had a second child, my husband went to working part-time for many, many years —16 years — which really helped me climb the ladder in the firm, because it gave me the flexibility to travel, and do other things I needed to do to get ahead,” she said. “Honestly, that was a huge boost to my career. It would have been a lot tougher for me if he hadn’t done that.”

Having a strong mentor additionally played a major role in Meiklejohn’s advancement.

“This mentor who was important to me was a man, not a woman,” she said. “A lot of women think, ‘well I need a woman to be a mentor,’ and in my office, there just wasn’t a senior woman that I clicked with.”

She said her mentor provided her with “great opportunities” and that some women “limit” themselves by only considering female mentors.

“He gave me chances to work on things that were really challenging and he also was someone who was so good at what he did that he inspired me to do my best work,” she continued.

The award has caused Meiklejohn to reflect on the accomplishments of women in her firm, as they have received many awards in recent years.

“We’ve got some great women in our firm who are doing great things and these different awards reflect that,” she said. “We should be proud of it, and we should hold our heads up.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/04/13/cornell-alumnae-named-women-worth-watching-in-stem/feed/1Professor Debunks the Mistaken Origins of the Creator of the Slavonic Languagehttp://cornellsun.com/2017/03/24/professor-debunks-the-mistaken-origins-of-the-creator-of-the-slavonic-language/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/24/professor-debunks-the-mistaken-origins-of-the-creator-of-the-slavonic-language/#respondFri, 24 Mar 2017 04:15:28 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1261491Prof. Julia Verkholantsev, Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania, discussed how St. Jerome — a scholar who came from Dalmatia and lived from the mid 300s to the early 400s — became mistakenly known as the creator of the Slavonic language in a talk Thursday.

In the mid-13th century, people started to think that St. Jerome had translated liturgical texts into Slavonic, Verkholantsev explained. However, St. Jerome did not create the Slavonic language.

“Among the Christian saints, St. Jerome has always occupied a special place as a translator and exegete of the Bible whose labors brought the faithful closer to God,” she said. “A native of Dalmatia, Jerome became recognized for allegedly translating the liturgical books of the Croatian clergy in Dalmatian monasteries into Church Slavonic and for having supplied them with their special Slavic letters.”

Verkholantsev said historical and archeological evidence has shown that the Slavs did not come to Dalmatia until the 6th century, which was after Jerome’s life. This means Jerome “could have no connection, either to Slavs or to their writing,” she said.

In converting people to Christianity, Slavonic liturgy proved to be a “powerful tool.”

Verkholantsev described how even though Slavonic monks wrote in Glagolitic writing — a script for the Slavonic language — they still maintained other traditions of the Western Church.

“With time, the Slavonic monks in Dalmatia adopted the rules of the Western church, but continued to use the Church Slavonic liturgy in Glagolitic writing,” she said. “They also participated in all Western liturgical reforms and revised their books according to the Vulgate and the Roman rite.”

“By the mid-13th century, the association between the Glagolitic writing of Croatia and Cyril and Methodius’s apostolic mission in great Moravia had most likely been lost, given way to the explanation that the Roman Slavonic rite and the Glagolitic letters of the creation clergy had been created by the great local scholar St. Jerome,” she continued.

Verkholantsev said the first example of this “belief” was when Pope Innocent IV “allowed the Slavonic liturgy” in a Dalmatian diocese in 1248. He mentioned that “the Slavic right in Dalmatia was believed to have proceeded from St. Jerome,” she said.

She added how St. Jerome’s Slavonic liturgy was important for both Slavs and other religious people.

“Since then, the belief of Jerome’s holy rite and letters lent itself to other uses, and resounded both among Slavic and Latinate communities,” Verkholantsev said. “To the Slavs, it provided rhetoric that claimed the distinguished place of Slavic people among Christian nations. To others, it provided the precedent of a vernacular Bible and a liturgy legitimized by indisputable authority.”

Even though it has been disproved that St. Jerome created the Slavonic language, he still is known in history as a “Slavic apostle.”

“The story of the Slavic Letters of St. Jerome not only reveals how a non-Latin rite became accepted in Latinate Europe … but also cast the religious and cultural history of this region in a new and refreshing context, highlighting the richly diverse flavor of Europe’s late middle ages,” she said.

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/24/professor-debunks-the-mistaken-origins-of-the-creator-of-the-slavonic-language/feed/0SA Discusses Changes to International Student Financial Aid, American Sign Language Courseshttp://cornellsun.com/2017/03/09/sa-discusses-changes-to-international-student-financial-aid-american-sign-language-courses/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/09/sa-discusses-changes-to-international-student-financial-aid-american-sign-language-courses/#commentsFri, 10 Mar 2017 04:52:12 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1191432Provost Michael Kotlikoff discussed changes to international student financial aid and the Student Assembly passed a referendum that would allow students to take American Sign Language for their college language requirement at their weekly meeting Thursday.

One of the recommendations of the Admissions and Financial Aid Working Group was to increase the number of no-aid international students using need-aware admissions, should there be an economic downturn requiring greater control of grant expenditures.

Kotlikoff also discussed proposed changes in loan distributions such that they more accurately reflect income quintiles and potentially lowering the cutoff for incomes eligible for grants from $60,000 to $45,000.

“Some of these suggestions are increasing the [loan] amounts for certain income classes, others are decreasing the loan amounts for certain classes,” he said. “Second, do we need to look at changing the income brackets? Spreading this a little bit, changing where we break our financial aid policy and where our loans were.”

Another recommendation Kotlikoff mentioned is evaluating where parent contributions to tuition were appropriate.

“Are there areas in which we can say parent contributions are not appropriate or are not as consistent as in other areas?” he said.

In terms of changes to international student aid, Kotlikoff said that Cornell does not “have the resources” to be need-blind for all international students.

“I spoke with S.A. last time I was here and talked about housing all our sophomores and slightly increasing our freshman intake,” Kotlikoff said. “If we do that, and we have some more international students, it will by necessity be need aware international students. Unless we’re successful in getting more endowment for international financial aid, it’ll increase that cohort.”

Chris Scott, a community member present at the S.A. meeting, expressed apprehension about the proposed financial aid changes.

“The number of international students that need aid will decrease relative to the number of students that need aid, and the report acknowledges that that will send a message to the international student community that rich international students are more likely to be accepted to Cornell University,” Scott said. “I think it will reflect very poorly on Cornell University.”

Kotlikoff said it was “unfortunate” that a draft about the financial working group was published in The Sun.

“One, that draft report did not really include the context for what we were talking about in financial aid, and absent of that context really alarmed people and gave them the wrong impression,” he said.

“And two, it was a draft document. The financial aid working group has been working since then. That document has changed quite a bit. It’s still not fully complete, but a lot of the recommendations are in flux,” Kotlikoff added.

Kotlikoff explained the history of financial aid at Cornell in recent years. He said that Cornell’s financial aid program used to be “less generous or extensive” than other Ivy League schools.

“Part of that is because we’re not as well endowed as those colleges and we have more students,” Kotlikoff explained. “However we made major commitments through our operating funds.”

Kotlifkoff said Cornell uses a greater percentage of its operating budget for financial aid than other Ivy league schools do.

“We’re paying now, on an adjusted basis, about $90 million a year more out of our operating budget than we did say in ’01, ’02,” Kotlikoff said. “And that has had, post the turn down in ’08, had a marked effect on all the budgets of the campus. But it is a major commitment that Cornell made to ‘any person.’”

He described how the cost of tuition has changed for different income quintiles, including the effect of inflation, and said that in recent years, the cost of education has decreased “dramatically” for the “bottom cohorts,” or students in the lowest income quintiles. He said that for students in the fourth quintile, which is the second highest income quintile, their tuition is about equal to what it was 20 years ago. For those in the highest income quintile of students receiving aid, the tuition “is starting to creep up” or increase on the graph he showed the assembly.

The graph showed that tuition has increased for students not receiving financial aid.

Cameron Pollack / Sun Photography Editor

Provost Michael Kotlikoff presents a graph showing how cost of tuition has changed for different income quintiles.

“There’s a potential squeeze on individuals that are unaided, particularly at the lower income of the unaided class,” Kotlikoff said. “That’s one of the issues that I’ve asked the committee to look at.”

ASL to be Considered in Classrooms

Student Assembly also passed a referendum that would allow students to take American Sign Language to meet their language requirement with a vote of 24-0-1.

This vote will put the question “Should American Sign Language satisfy the foreign language requirement at Cornell?” on the S.A. election ballot later in March.

“Currently it does not satisfy the language requirement, so students are coming in with transfer credit,” said Mary Grace Hager ’19, co-president of Cornell University Deaf Awareness Project. “They can’t even fulfill it.”

She further noted that though there is currently no ASL class, students with background in the language should be able to earn credit for their ASL knowledge.

“If a student has American Sign Language experience, they clearly may have much difficulty learning another language, so it would benefit the community tremendously if they could have that credit count,” she said.

In addition to learning the language itself, students could learn about Deaf culture like they can learn about foreign cultures through other language courses, Hager said.

“Deaf culture is its own kind of culture,” she said. “There is a very strong community. This definitely fulfills the foreign language as teaching you a new culture, versing you in a new type of environment.”

Median Grades on Transcripts

Student Assembly also denied a referendum that would have allowed the question “Should median course grades be included on student transcripts?” to be on the S.A. election ballot.

“[First generation students] graduate at statistically lower rates, and a lot of the time it’s because we feel like an inadequacy in academics, in seeing our transcript and seeing that we did below the median,” she continued. “I think that’s detrimental to our emotional well-being and when we apply to jobs.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/09/sa-discusses-changes-to-international-student-financial-aid-american-sign-language-courses/feed/1Protesters Demand Sanctuary, Funding for Undocumented Cornellians and IC Studentshttp://cornellsun.com/2017/03/02/protesters-demand-sanctuary-funding-for-undocumented-cornellians-and-ic-students/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/02/protesters-demand-sanctuary-funding-for-undocumented-cornellians-and-ic-students/#commentsFri, 03 Mar 2017 03:29:30 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1158793Cornell students and faculty gathered on the Arts Quad Thursday to demand that the University set up a designated fund for Cornellians with and without DACA status and strengthen its commitment to keeping student information private from federal immigration agents.

Prof. Russell Rickford, history, was an organizer of the event named “Sanctuary Now Cornell: Solidarity against Tyranny.” He estimated that 250 to 300 people attended the protest, which was hosted by Cornell Coalition for Inclusive Democracy.

CCID also asked the University to give housing and resources to students unable to travel, become a refuge for scholars “fleeing dangerous situations abroad” and “fight” in Albany and Washington D.C. to safeguard the community.

Students and faculty who gathered on the freezing but sunny Arts Quad listened to speeches regarding the rights of undocumented people and oppressive systems in the United States.

“Our endangered community members still lack explicit assurance that the institution that took them in will protect them,” Rickford said. “That’s shameful.”

Rickford led the crowd in chants including, “No ban. No wall. Sanctuary for all.” He also told the audience that “today we say no.”

“No more deportations,” he announced, “No more raids. No more fear. None of us live with dignity while such atrocities continue.”

Prof. Joe Margulies, government and law, said it is easy for future students to look back and imagine that they would have protested.

“Nothing is easier than to mythologize moments in the past and and to think, from the safe distance of time and space, that you would resist injustice when it appeared,” Margulies said. “You believe that you would oppose the Palmer Raids a century ago, but most people didn’t.”

He also spoke about how people protesting these struggles will not be in the majority.

“The truth is most people will never stand with you,” he said. “You will always be in a minority. But, the truth is, we look back on those periods now as periods of grave injustice, where time has turned against what was done. And you don’t need the majority; what you need is a very dedicated, involved minority.”

Cornell students — documented and undocumented alike — also spoke during the protest.

“Coming here, I walk through this quad everyday, and I look up at that clock tower, and I think that this institution was founded to be a place where any person can find instruction in any study, but Cornell puts barriers up in front of all undocumented people,” said Julia Montejo ’17, who identified herself as an undocumented student with DACA status.

Montejo said she did not receive financial aid from Cornell for three years and had to get aid from other sources.

“I had to sacrifice meals. I had to sacrifice having the right books. I had to do everything to thrive at this school,” Montejo said. “Now that Cornell’s caught up, which is a little late for many people, Cornell is refusing to explicitly state that CUPD will not cooperate with ICE. It’s refusing to explicitly state that they won’t help remove people.”

Angela Sun ’18 said the University should not be “swayed by the fear” of carrying out something because it is considered “super liberal.”

“As a university that’s full of so many different types of students, to have an administration that is very homogenous in either their thoughts, or their race, or their ethnicity, I think that’s a bad reflection of what the students want,” Sun said.

Two students represented Ithaca College in the protest. Anna Gardner, vice president of campus affairs for Ithaca College’s Student Governance Council, said that a recently passed SGC resolution will allow IC students to live in campus housing this summer.

“Currently, affected students can stay on campus during our spring break at no cost, and we’re working with our office of international programs and residential life to provide summer housing for these students as well,” Gardner said.

“Ithaca College and Cornell University have the opportunity to join forces as communities,” she continued. “We must stand together in opposition to discriminatory legislation and strengthen our local movement.”

Sophie May ’20, a participant in the protest, expressed optimism after observing faculty involvement in the rally.

“I’m excited about the idea that our faculty are standing up for both faculty and students and members of the community here who are being targeted or stand to be targeted by the shitty legislation going on in the Trump administration right now,” she said. “I think all the speakers who said this are right, that we have to stand on the right side of history right now. That’s being here.”

]]>http://cornellsun.com/2017/03/02/protesters-demand-sanctuary-funding-for-undocumented-cornellians-and-ic-students/feed/13Apgar, Former Dean of Students, Sought to End Traditional Greek Pledge Systemhttp://cornellsun.com/2017/02/05/departing-dean-sought-to-end-traditional-pledge-system/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss
http://cornellsun.com/2017/02/05/departing-dean-sought-to-end-traditional-pledge-system/#commentsSun, 05 Feb 2017 23:44:25 +0000http://cornellsun.com/?p=1045243Travis Apgar, former senior associate dean of students, left Cornell in January to become Dean of Students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute — but he also left behind a legacy in hazing prevention.

Apgar worked to end the pledge system that fraternities and sororities used in recruitment and to replace it with an orientation system that is based on the first-year orientation program.

“The orientation model is really expected that it is a neutral platform built on mutual respect, that this is not about new members proving themselves worthy to become members,” Apgar said. “There may be some information that they certainly need to know about the organization, to demonstrate their commitment to the organization’s activities and values, but in very positive ways.”

Apgar said that hazing has decreased on Cornell’s campus in recent years.

“We’ve seen a significant decrease, which I’m not aware of any other campus being able to report such a significant decrease, not just in Greek life, but athletics has done a great job as well there,” said Apgar, who wrote on his LinkedIn page that he is “considered an authority on hazing prevention.”

Tim Marchell, director of the Skorton Center for Health Initiatives, said a University hazing survey found that in 2013, 39 percent of Cornell undergraduate students had taken part in at least one hazing activity, according the University’s definition of the word. The number was even higher for social sorority and fraternity members: 48 percent.

But those numbers dropped by 2015. Thirty-one percent of all undergraduates said they had been involved in hazing, and only 35 percent of students in social sororities and fraternities said the same, according to Marchell.

Over those two years, the University carried out strategies to combat hazing after George DesDunes ’13 died from hazing in 2011 and President Skorton called for an end to hazing in Greek life through “ending pledging as we know it,” which prompted Greek life’s shift to the orientation model, according to Marchell.

“Dean Apgar played an instrumental role in helping to re-shape the experience of students joining the Greek system during that time,” Marchell said.

In contrast to the University’s past where “first-year students were often hazed just because they were first-year students,” Apgar said that Cornell today uses a different model of “welcoming” new students.

“Through [first-year] orientation, we are making sure that they are comfortable, that they transition to the academic rigors, as well as the social structure, and the opportunities, so that we retain as many students as possible and help them be successful,” he said. “So I think that using that foundation is what we’re trying to do with fraternities and sororities.”

The new system requires that fraternities and sororities complete a report every semester that must be approved by alumni, the national or international organization and the Office of Fraternity, Sorority and Independent Living, according to Apgar. The organizations also have to plan out their orientation events ahead of time.

Frederick Tamarkin ’19, president of Pi Kappa Phi fraternity, said he believes the orientation method was “a step in the right direction.”

Kara Miller, Apgar’s successor as Director of Greek Life and Associate Director of Student and Organization Development, remarked that Apgar “brought a breadth of experience in student affairs” to his position.

“He was genuinely interested in student development and in helping the fraternity and sorority experience be a positive and meaningful opportunity for Cornellians,” she said.

Apgar has worked directly with fraternities facing hazing-induced sanctions. When Pi Kappa Phi was placed on interim suspension in Spring 2016, Apgar “led the dialogue between the University and the fraternity” during the suspension process, according to Tamarkin.

“I believe that OFSIL and the IFC handled the process professionally,” Tamarkin said. “Additional improvements, if any, should focus on transparent communication throughout all levels of University administration.”

Apgar was also co-chair of the Council on Hazing Prevention, a group that “focused on expanding hazing prevention beyond the Greek system,” according to Marchell, who was the other co-chair.

“Travis was outspoken and steadfast in his commitment to preventing hazing, and his expertise on this issue had a major impact on our campus and the lives of our students,” he said. “We’re going to miss him.”